Welcome to Fresh Picks for the month of December! This month's newsletter contains the usual wide variety of titles to spark your interest. We're particularly pleased to include Roopa Farooki's debut, Bitter Sweets. You'll find it in the Under the Radar category.

Richard Lanyon answers to the aristocratic Sweetwater family that own the land he farms. Richards ambition is boundless, so he arranges a marriage for his only son, Peter. Though Peter and his bride settle into marriage, each harbors a broken heart--and secrets.

From the acclaimed, award-winning author of "Waiting" comes a new novel that eloquently re-imagines the American immigrant saga. Jin tells the story of the Wu family, that sets out on a journey through contemporary America in search of a sense of belonging.

With an elegant sweetness and a pitch-perfect sense of western life reminiscent of Annie Dillard, Glosss breakout novel is a remarkable story about the connections between people and animals and how they touch one another in the most unexpected and profound ways.

A young woman of mixed race navigates the twists and turns of first love and shifting family loyalties. Moving towards a definition of self that encompasses all the aspects of American, diversity, she wonders if her newfound identity requires her to distance herself from those she loves.

In this essential work of fiction, DeLillo traces the way the events of September 11 kindled or rekindled relationships and reconfigured Americas perceptions of the world in a novel that is beautiful, heartbreaking, and, ultimately, redemptive.

In an era when the blind were routinely warehoused in asylums, James Holman was studying medicine, fighting the slave trade in Africa, hunting rogue elephants, surviving a frozen captivity in Siberia, and circumnavigating the world alone in the 19th century.

This rollicking saga by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" is set 1,000 years ago along the ancient Silk Road, and tells the tale of two wandering adventurers and unlikely soul mates.

Set in Denmark in the here and now, this masterful, inventive novel centers around Kaspar Krone, a world-renowned circus clown with a deep love for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and an even deeper gambling debt.

Depicting contemporary power politics at its most ruthless, this provocative novel takes on the most incendiary issues in American culture: racism, terrorism, religious fundamentalism, gay rights, and the rise of media monopolies with their own agenda and lust for power.

From the author of "Married to a Stranger" and "The Girl Next Door" comes this chilling novel about a 20-year-old murder, a present-day killer, and the controversial role of the death penalty in the criminal justice system.

With this spellbinding first novel about the destructive lies three immigrant generations of a Pakistani/Bangladeshi family tell each other, Farooki has crafted an intelligent, engrossing, and emotionally powerful Indian family saga.

The only thing certain about a journey is that it has a beginning and an end--for you never know what may happen along the way. And so it is with this journey into the minds and souls of two very different men--one of them in search of the truth, the other a man who may have already found it.